Guest Blog: How to Ruin Halloween

Yay! I love guest blogs. Here is Elizabeth's take on Halloween and her own mortality.

I love Halloween. I love costumes, and dancing, and fall, and pumpkins. I love that prudish girls become slutty referees, nurses, and Dorothys. I love scaring children when they come to the door, body paint, eating candy, fog machines, and lasers. I love fake blood, fake swords, haunted houses, fake spiders, and hay rides. I even love the way the rotting leaves smell while I dance the Monster Mash.

What I do NOT love are doctors. Latrophobia is, as far as I’m concerned, one of the most rational fears that modern man has to deal with. When you go to the doctor with any type of symptom, there is only one thing that he or she can relay, which is that there is something wrong with you. Either they have reasonable empirical evidence that there is a disease, break, disorder, wound, condition, infection, mutation or detrimental lifestyle habit, or there is nothing medically wrong, and you have to continue to live with the symptom while knowing they think you’ve made it up. In addition, the only person who can say with any authority that your life is about to end is someone with a medical license. Considering my eternal demise is also one of my least favorite things. I tend to believe that all those people who have come to terms with death haven’t really grasped the gravity of the end of their existence.

Needless to say, going to the doctor is extremely low on my list of priorities. I typically go only if there is no other way I can avoid it. When I have to go, I will hyperventilate for several days preceding the event while I think of ways to tell my family that I do in fact have a chronic disease that is very painful and will soon kill me. Depending on severity of the issue and the amount of time I have between scheduling and execution, I may break into hives, have a spike in my diastolic blood pressure, and/or cry until my face looks like Rhianna’s at the end of her relationship with Chris Brown.

Long story short, I thought the doctor couldn’t get much worse, but on my recent visit I found that to be false. My doctor came into my room and introduced himself with a smile. He apologized for being late, and was still wearing his scrubs from the surgery that he had just completed. He had me lay back on the table while I was violated with cold metal instruments more appropriate for an alien abduction than a Tuesday afternoon. As I stared at the ceiling during my probing, there was only one thing to look at . . . . the bloody skeleton doctor seen in this photo. All I could think was, “How could you ruin Halloween too?”